Travel The Universe With 11 Short Story Collections By Women

The International Women’s Day (IWD) strike was, according to the organizers’ platform, “by and for women who have been marginalized and silenced by decades of neoliberalism directed towards working women, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women.” Nowhere do we understand the variances of those voices better than in short story collections by women, who finally have the ability to put a voice to their story.

Every March 8, IWD provides a necessary moment for re-imagining the world for women and others. As to the rest of the year: Many women who write short stories have long been involved in the hard work of re-crafting the possible as short stories were long a space of women’s work. Beginning in the world of folktales, stories have, in practice, become a sandbox for formal, stylistic, and ideational experimentation.

Women writers — from Mahasweta Devi (India) to Octavia Butler (US, outer space) to Irenosen Okojie (Nigeria, UK) to Malika Moustadraf (Morocco) to Rasha Abbas (Syria, Germany) — have re-imagined life and literature through the limits and possibilities of the short form. Women’s short-story writing has, unfortunately, not found as firm a footing in translation as have other forms. Malika Moustadraf and Rasha Abbas, for instance, have yet to see full collections in English.

Yet there are many short-story gems for readers who want to break loose from the ordinary.

Okorafor is a genius of reinvention, seeming to slough off imaginary worlds like dead skin. Her short-story worlds are breakneck mini-creations, little labs where it feels as though she tests out ideas she then folds into her novels.

Okojie’s short stories crisscross the globe, inventing new worlds, new pathways, new relationships. They are crammed full, sometimes standing language on its head, sometimes pushing it over a cliff to see the shower of words come down.

This collection, set in Kuwait, threads through Anglophone, Arab, and Japanese fictional influences, moving between folktales and slick modern stories in painting a picture of twentieth and twenty-first-century Kuwait.